Rom-com queen Meg Ryan charmed a packed house during an appearance at the Sarajevo Film Festival on Tuesday, reprising some of her iconic roles in movies including “When Harry Met Sally” and “You’ve Got Mail” while also opening up about her life and career in the movie business since turning 60.
“I don’t look at the downside very often. I am the luckiest person you’re ever going to meet,” she said. “I don’t have feelings like I’m being denied anything. I have a charmed existence and I work with incredible people.”
Ryan is appearing at the Bosnian fest to receive a lifetime achievement award and to present her latest film, “What Happens Later,” a romantic comedy that she directed, wrote and executive produced, and in which she stars opposite David Duchovny as ex-lovers who find themselves stranded by a snowstorm.
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She’s also presenting a special screening of her 1998 hit romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail” at the Coca-Cola Open Air Cinema, the same venue where it screened 25 years ago at the Sarajevo fest’s fifth edition.
Tuesday’s masterclass, moderated by Academy Award-winning Bosnian director Danis Tanović (“No Man’s Land”), opened with a clip of the iconic deli scene in “When Harry Met Sally,” which drew no less an enthusiastic response from the Sarajevo audience as it has throughout the 35 years since its release.
Insisting that she “[hadn’t] heard that in so long,” Ryan described co-star Billy Crystal as “the perfect person to fake an orgasm with” and deadpanned, “What a crazy thing to be famous for.”
The actor recalled getting her start in the ’80s on the long-running soap opera “As the World Turns” — a gig she took to help pay her way through NYU — before a scene-stealing turn across from Tom Cruise in the 1986 blockbuster “Top Gun” propelled her into the mainstream.
Her second film, “When Harry Met Sally,” was the first of a trio of career-defining roles in romantic comedies — including “You’ve Got Mail” and “Sleepless in Seattle” — written by the late, great Nora Ephron, who Ryan praised for her “way of creating an environment to bring out the best in people.”
“She made the set like a dinner party at her house. It was so fun,” she said. “She’d have cook-offs and taste-offs. Everyone on the set was interesting to talk to. It was like a dinner party you never wanted to leave.” Returning to her star-making scene in a New York deli, she added: “That’s just great writing. And that’s Nora Ephron. And you almost never get writing like that.”
“What Happens Later” marks Ryan’s second directorial effort following the 2015 film “Ithaca,” in which she directed and starred alongside her son, Jack Quaid, and reunited on-screen with Tom Hanks for the fourth time. The Bleecker Street Media release is her first time directing and writing a romantic comedy.
based on Steven Dietz’s play “Shooting Star,” the film follows two old flames who, after bumping into each other when their flights get snowed in, spend the night in an airport reliving the past.
Ryan, who returns to the screen for the first time in eight years, said the film — shot in three weeks on a $3 million budget — had a “very high bar of difficulty,” but added that the challenge was part of what inspired her to make it.
“How fully can you see your limitations as opportunities? We didn’t have a big budget. We shot in 21 nights. The movie had to have scope,” she said. “We ended up shooting in a museum in Arkansas. We couldn’t control the extras — we had to use real people. All of those things were fun to try to figure out in this limited time on this limited budget.”
Recalling some of her memorable performances on the big screen, Ryan described taking terse instructions from director Tony Scott on the set of “Top Gun” (“In this scene, you’re happy”; “In this scene, you’re sad”), boning up on the works of Carl Jung to play three different women in “Joe Versus the Volcano,” and struggling to get into character when tasked to play a drunk in “When a Man Loves a Woman.” She also discussed a role she famously turned down, for “Silence of the Lambs,” noting that Jodie Foster was “the right person” to play FBI trainee Clarice Starling, while adding: “I don’t see it as a comedy.”
Asked about the opportunities for older women in Hollywood, Ryan admitted there were certain limitations for women after a certain age, but added that those limitations spurred her to push her career in new directions.
“There’s no doubt that for anybody older, roles are limited — for an actor,” she said. “But those limits don’t exist for a director, or a producer. And at a certain point you just want to say what you mean. And sometimes, that’s not about being an actor.”
Ryan teased a trio of upcoming projects, one in which she has a starring role, one of which she’s attached to direct, and a third that she plans to direct and produce.
“I just love being in the environment of storytelling. And I discovered midway through my career the value of the community in it — not just of the filmmakers, but the community with the audience. And just what a lucky way to make a living,” she said. “I’m just trying to tee up things like that. You just throw all kinds of things at the wall until you see what sticks.”
The Sarajevo Film Festival runs Aug. 16 – 23.
